1456705 - Nightly on Linux continues to download GMP plugins

Status: NEW

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, defect, P5)

Description

[Peter Hedenskog]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.117 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

I'm using Firefox Nightly to do performance tests and try to remove all the extra requests that happens in the background to make sure they do not affect performance.

Setting the app.update.enabled preferences to false (https://github.com/sitespeedio/browsertime/blob/master/lib/firefox/webdriver/firefoxPreferences.js) seems to work fine on Mac OS X. By looking in the HTTP log (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Debugging/HTTP_logging) there's no extra requests to any *.mozilla.org domain.

When I run Firefox Nightly on Ubuntu in Docker it seems that I'm not able to disable the request(s) for autoupdates. I use the exact same configuration but when I check the HTTP log I see:
https://aus5.mozilla.org/update/3/GMP/61.0a1/20180317134556/Linux_x86_64-gcc3/null/nightly-cck-ubuntu/Linux%204.9.87-linuxkit-aufs%20(GTK%203.22.25%2Clibpulse%20not-available)/canonical/1.0/update.xml

And I haven't been able to turn off those requests.

Comment 1

[Gingerbread Man]

That's not an application update check. If you open the update.xml file in a text editor, you can see it's a check for the OpenH264 and Widevine plug-ins.

media.eme.enabled = false
should disable both the plug-ins and the update checks. It should also be the default on Linux, according to bug 1404048.

media.gmp-gmpopenh264.autoupdate = false
There's also this preference, specifically for turning off update checks for OpenH264.

media.gmp-widevinecdm.enabled = false
There doesn't seem to be a Widevine equivalent; just a prefence to disable the plug-in.

Comment 2

[Nils Ohlmeier [:drno]]

Try setting media.gmp-provider.enabled to false. From a quick look that appears to turn off download of all GMP plugins.

BTW another way of avoiding background traffic for testing purposes is to simply use a user profile which has downloaded the plugins already.

Comment 3

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

FWIW, all, I've taken a stab at this on the WebPageTest side, to try to eliminate/mitigate it, here: https://github.com/WPO-Foundation/wptagent/pull/212

Comment 4

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Mass-removing myself from cc; search for 12b9dfe4-ece3-40dc-8d23-60e179f64ac1 or any reasonable part thereof, to mass-delete these notifications (and sorry!)